The surprisingly delightful musings of a humble Virginian whose satiric paeons to a plausible utopia implicitly shame the cynical zeitgeist of our times, causing it to cry, as 'twere, 'Damn, what was I thinking?' or words to that effect.

The Bipartisan Fascism of Corporate Drug Testing

I woke this morning with a renewed indignation at the phenomenon of "drug testing" by corporations. That is one field (I reflected) in which the Republicans not only won the battle but the war, as well, and methinks it's time to fight back.

Forgive me if I couch the matter in these terms...

RESOLVED...

that nothing is more "prima facie" intrusive and arbitrary than to require a prospective store clerk to supply his or her own urine to a company for analysis absent any cause whatsoever except some hysterical notion (encouraged by idiot politicians) that "drugs" in general are a great social menace (when by "drugs" these bureaucrats mean those pharmacological substances from which Big Pharma isn't getting its fair cut).

Even if the prospective employee has used, say, marijuana, the normal "street penalty" for such use is often a fine (or nothing at all in Colorado). But this new extra-judiciary testing makes marijuana use punishable by economic death, actually barring the user from securing gainful employment. Talk about an out-sized penalty! And this when no scientific studies have determined that such use affects one's performance on the job, provided that the user is not inebriated during work hours.

If corporations really thought that marijuana use was a real misfortune, they would not punish the users but help them. But then that would cost the corporations money. And drug tests have never been about helping employees, it's been about proudly demonstrating a company's lack of tolerance (a callousness misnamed "patriotism") to the hysterical mob and the politicians who counseled said mob to "break out the pitchforks" on this hot-button topic.

Meanwhile, the billionaire owners of the companies performing the testing would never deign to give a urine sample themselves at the request of anyone. ("Let them just try! Who, me? A rich person? One of the one percent? I should think not! Humph! I've got my rights, you know, even if nobody else does!") Thus only the rich can afford to buck the fascist trend, however hypocritically they may be in doing so. True, Steve Jobs openly praised his use of LSD for spawning his creativity -- which is nice given the new therapeutic findings of that demonized substance -- yet if a waitress at Denny's were to make the same proud declaration of prior use, she would be "out on her serving tray" before you could say, "more napkins, please!"